Photo Via Wikimedia Commons/ Breakdowndiode

The island, administered by Taipei but just 2 miles from the mainland, has a culture and lifestyle all its own. A scene from Xifang Street in Little Kinmen (Lieyu). “If you look over there, you can see the propaganda sign.

It reads ‘unite China under one country two systems,’” a fisherman told me. I was standing surrounded by old rusted anti-tank spikes on the beach of Kinmen, an island administered by Taiwan, but geographically a part of China’s Fujian province. At this closest point, it feels like you can reach out and touch the skyscrapers of China’s Xiamen city, which is just 2 miles across the water.

The fisherman comes here every day with his rod and a bucket of bait. He knows the skyline of Xiamen like the back of his hand. I don’t worry about China, he tells me, Life here is very peaceful, and we keep to ourselves.

This view is held by many residents of Kinmen, who view themselves neither as Taiwanese, nor as Fujianese. They take pride in their local identity. The coastline of China’s southeastern Fujian province is littered with hundreds of small islands, many of them relatively nondescript.

However, two of them stand out as remnants of a Cold War that has never truly ended: Kinmen and Matsu. In 1949, China’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), led by Chiang Kai-shek was facing defeat against Mao Zedong’s communists. The KMT and its Republic of China government retreated to the island of Taiwan, from which Chiang planned to regroup and organize an attack to retake the mainland.

Chiang made the strategic decision to hold on to three islands along the coast: Kinmen, Matsu, and Dachen. He believed keeping these footholds would offer a strategic advantage when launching an attack to retake China. As U.S. support for the Chinese Nationalists faded, this plan gradually became a pipe dream.

Meanwhile, the forces of the newly founded People’s Republic of China constantly bombarded these islands with shells. Chiang eventually gave up Dachen, but held on to Kinmen and Matsu. An aerial photograph, taken from a plane, show Xiamen city (bottom), Little Kinmen (center) and Kinmen Island (left).

Photo via Wikimedia Commons/ BreakdownDiode. The outlying islands remained largely cut off from the economic boom Taiwan went through in the 1980s and ‘90s. Even today, the stark lack of modern infrastructure was one of the most obvious contrasts I felt as I cleared immigration at Kinmen’s ferry terminal and took my first steps on the island. The 30-minute ferry crossing was not only like crossing into another world, but also into another time.

Unlike nearby Xiamen – with wide, clean boulevards lined with palm trees in perfect rows and huge glass skyscrapers either side – the roads of Kinmen felt worn out and battered. The road into the main town of Jincheng passed through farmland with crumbling houses that seemed to all cling to the same tiny spot as if competing against each other for space. As I checked into my hotel, I asked the receptionist why I was unable to find any cars on either Uber or its Chinese version Didi.

We don’t have any ride hailing services here on Kinmen. If you need transport I can call the taxi company, but you may need to wait half an hour to an hour, she told me. Many people like to hire a scooter to explore Kinmen, but I felt that booking a local driver to take me around the island would be a good way to gain local insights.

I booked a taxi to take me around the island the next day, and then I visited the nearby 7Eleven, apparently the only one on the whole island – and, as I found the next day, the only place to get coffee in the mornings. Overall, I noticed a distinct lack of any large chains on the island – not Western, Taiwanese, nor Chinese. Mom-and-pop businesses still seemed to largely dominate here.